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In 2007, Huth’s grandmother was taking 12 different medications and became one of the estimated 175,000 patients over 65 who become sick each year as the result of adverse drug interactions. It took Huth, a PhD in pharmacology who was working on his MD at the time, hours of research to pinpoint which drug interactions were causing the problem.

“Just putting that all together took so much time, and I thought there had to be better software out there to do this. And there wasn’t,” Huth said.

The experience helped inspire Huth to start ScopiaRx, a software company that’s helping busy doctors make informed decisions when prescribing drugs, and giving patients and caregivers information to recognize early warning signs. Some 30 million Americans take between 5-25 medications each day.

Over the last six years, Huth has been working with key stakeholders – including hospital systems, senior care organizations, pharmacies and physician organizations – to refine how critical information is delivered in a practical way.

ScopiaRx’s software analyzes how multiple drugs will interact with each other, as well as how those drugs are likely to interact with individual patients. The company will start a marketing campaign next week, beginning with a handful of selected cities primarily in the Northeast. It is offering 90-day free trials of its beta version through its web site.

ScopiaRx currently has four full-time employees and contracts with numerous consultants. Its leadership team includes chief financial officer Al Wallander, who is also the CFO for startups dotloop and Market6. ScopiaRx has raised $1.3 million to date from a small group of local investors, and Huth anticipates the company will begin raising a $3 million - $5 million funding round early next year to scale the product. ScopiaRx is also currently in serious conversations with several major potential strategic partners.

The process starts with ScopiaRx’s web or mobile application, which was built by Northern Kentucky University’s College of Informatics. After a patient’s personal health and prescription history is entered into ScopiaRx’s platform, the company’s software churns through layers of information, including a proprietary drug database comprised of two main sources. One source is drug label information from the FDA. The other source is 4 million case reports the FDA receives after a drug goes on the market, which physicians cannot easily access.

ScopiaRx then generates one-page reports in a matter of seconds designed to benefit various parties along a patient’s continuum of care.

Patients and caregivers, for example, get a report that helps them recognize early signs of potentially dangerous side effects that could be caused by multiple medications. That’s a powerful tool for family caregivers who are taking care of parents or relatives.

“It’s one thing for a family member to be responsible and make sure that your loved one is taking the right medication at the right time, but now you have all these medications. That’s a pretty scary thing,” said Arlene de Silva, owner of Silva Consulting, which focuses on improving senior care. De Silva is working with ScopiaRx.

Physicians get a different report that has a highly sophisticated summary of drug safety information to guide them toward making the right decisions for patients. It’s important for doctors to have a full picture of their patients’ individual histories, said ScopiaRx advisor Dr. Greg Rouan. Rouan chairs the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Cincinnati.

“When it comes to drug safety, it’s very easy to miss important clues. Patients may have experienced an important drug side effect in the past and neglect to tell you that, particularly if the drug was prescribed by someone else. Very often minor side effects are enough to discourage someone from faithfully taking important medications such as for diabetes and heart failure. This poor adherence ultimately results in unnecessary hospitalizations,” he said.

“On the other extreme, patients may take a medication too long, and if I didn’t prescribe it, this is something that is easy to miss. Drug disease databases are very important to guide the communication between patients and their doctors so that this essential information is shared.”

ScopiaRx is just the latest adventure for Huth. The Cincinnati native studied chemistry at Xavier University, and got his PhD in pharmacology from the University of Michigan. He trained at the National Institutes of Health before joining Abbott Laboratories in 1997, where he worked on drug discovery and drug safety.

He returned to Cincinnati in 2007 and earned an MD at the University of Cincinnati in 2011. At UC, he started building a rough database which led to ScopiaRx, and put together a board of advisors. An Imagining Grant from CincyTech, the initial seed-stage investor, allowed Huth to validate his idea, and in 2012 he committed full time to ScopiaRx, where he is the chief executive officer.

“Being an entrepreneur is like being a scientist, you’re driven to solve problems and you just can’t walk away from them,” he said.